Nancy heard the news quietly and regarded the preparations going forward as though they belonged not to herself but to another. The amah, whom she had saved, took her reprieve with stolid surprise. She thanked the t'ai-t'ai and said nothing more. She seemed thoroughly cowed by the narrowness of her escape and was more discreet than she had ever been, taking care to leave Nancy alone lest she appear to interfere with the cherished schemes of the t'ai-t'ai. Yet she did much thinking. She was not blind to the mystery of the change in her fortunes, but quick enough to connect it with the openly mooted rumor that Nancy herself, incredible though it was, had asked to have the day of her wedding hastened. She thought and brooded, but there was no one to whom she could appeal.
Nancy was silent. Her father showed signs of renewed illness; he grew haggard and lean, took no care for any company except Kuei-lien's, abused her in spells of morbid cruelty and then fell back, terrified and choking, a prey to the attacks of heart disease which were recurring more and more often. The man had given up hope of living much longer.
"I will enjoy myself while I last," he vowed.
Kuei-lien was both his passion and his doom. He was jealous of every moment she spent out of his sight. He planned, in his more evil moments, to kill his concubine before he died so that she should not have the satisfaction of practising upon others the wiles she had practised upon him. He hated her and adored her, and for hours satiated his hunger for the receding beauty of life by the sight of her clad in the most splendid garments he could command, stiff golden brocades, satins dyed to match the dissolving gray of the eastern sky at dawn, lustrous fabrics surpassed by the cool skin of the girl, fabrics forgotten when Herrick looked at the poignant loveliness of her face, features of a candid delicacy on which the lust and greed of the world seemed to have written no trace. She sang the old haunting songs of the farmer and the fisherman and the scholar and the hermit in his mountains, verse after verse, with an artlessness which was incomparable art, the pathetic innocence of a child. There were times when Herrick's gloomy room was lit up by the splendor of Kuei-lien's beauty, when the concubine herself, great in the austere perfection of her presence, was not great enough to vie with the golden illusion she created.
Often the pain of these supreme illusions drove the man into frenzy; at other times it quieted his heart, as though there were nothing more to be satisfied with in life. His spirit grew numb. Caught by Kuei-lien's enchantment, he nodded his head, fell drowsily asleep, thinking what bliss it would be never to wake, but to stay lulled through eternity by the vision he had seen. Yet he always woke, and always from disturbed dreams in which Nancy unaccountably had taken the place of Kuei-lien and reproached him with a slow smile on her lips. She kept jerking him back to life, jerking him back when all his senses were slow and his eyes ready for sleep.
"There will be no peace till she is married," he said, "and I wonder if I shall have peace then."
On the impulse of a moment he decided to atone to his children for the neglect of a year. They should have one more summer in the hills.
"She shall have one more happy summer and be free as the wind," he said.
Against the violent protests of the t'ai-t'ai, he stuck to his plan, but as a sop to his wife he added Li-an to the party, and off to the Western Hills he went. Kuei-lien, Nancy, Edward, the amah, they all went along, rubbing their eyes to see the willows still hanging low over the ditches, the two camels grazing where they grazed twelve months ago,—they seemed hardly to have moved in the seasons which had intervened,—and to gaze, with the rapture bred of imprisonment within walls, upon the vast, gentle color of the mountains.
While their chairs toiled over the hills, Kuei-lien sang fragments of old songs; her voice was tender as the evening light. Much though the bitterness which had grown between them, Nancy could not help loving the other girl in this hour of sunset because there came forth from her tones that sadness of the human lot which was common to them both.